Darkness, Take My Hand

  “I can see goose pimples,” the passenger said.

  I moved two steps to my right, and my feet felt like they were sinking into wet sponge.

  The passenger clown glanced quickly down the avenue and back toward me.

  The driver looked in the rearview and his hand disappeared from the wheel.

  “Patrick?” Phil said. “Let’s go.”

  “Patrick,” the passenger clown said slowly, as if he were licking the word. “That’s a nice name. What’s your last name, Patrick?”

  Even now, I have no idea why I answered. Total fear, perhaps, a desire to buy time, but even then, I should have known to give a false name, but I didn’t. I had some desperate feeling, I guess, that if they knew my last name, they’d see me as a person, not a victim, and I’d receive mercy.

  “Kenzie,” I said.

  And the clown gave me a seductive smile, and I heard the door latch unlock like a round ratcheting into a shotgun.

  That’s when I threw the baseball.

  I don’t recall planning it. I merely took two steps to my right—thick, slow steps as if I were in a dream—and I think initially I was aiming for the clown himself as he started to open his door.

  Instead, the ball sailed out of my hand and someone said, “Shit!” and there was a loud popping noise as the ball buried itself in the center of the windshield and the glass fractured and webbed.

  Phil screamed, “Help! Help!”

  The passenger door swung open and I could see fury in the clown’s face.

  I stumbled as I leaped forward and gravity pushed me down Savin Hill Avenue.

  “Help!” Phil screamed and then he ran and I was right behind him, my arms still pinwheeling as I tried to keep my balance and the pavement kept jerking toward my face.

  A beefy man with a mustache as thick as a brush head stepped out of Bulldog’s bar at the corner of Sydney, and we could hear tires squealing behind us. The beefy man looked angry; he had a sawed-off bat in his hand, and at first I thought he was going to use it on us.

  His apron, I remember, bore swaths of meaty red and brown.

  “Fuck’s going on?” the man said, and his eyes narrowed at something over my shoulder, and I knew the van was coming for all of us. It was going to jump the curb and mangle us.

  I turned my head in order to see my own death, and instead I saw a flash of grimy orange tail lights as the van spun the corner onto Grampian Way and disappeared.

  The bar owner knew my father and ten minutes later my old man came into Bulldog’s as Phil and I sat at the bar with our ginger ales and pretended they were whiskeys.

  My father wasn’t always mean. He had his good days. And for whatever reason, that day was one of his best. He wasn’t angry we’d stayed out past dinner time, though I’d been beaten for the same offense only a week before. Usually indifferent to my friends, he ruffled Phil’s hair and bought us several more ginger ales and two heaping corned beef sandwiches, and we sat in the bar with him until night had risen up the doorway on our left and the bar had filled.

  When I told him in a faltering voice what had happened, his face grew as tender and kind as I’d ever seen it, and he peered at me with soft worry and wiped my wet bangs off my forehead with a thick, gentle finger and dabbed the corned beef off the corner of my mouth with a napkin.

  “You two had some day,” he said. He whistled and smiled at Phil and Phil smiled back broadly.

  My father’s smile, so rare, was a thing of wonder.

  “I didn’t mean to bust the window,” I said. “I didn’t mean to, Dad.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “You’re not mad?”

  He shook his head.

  “I—”

  “You did great, Patrick. You did great,” he whispered. He took my head to his broad chest and kissed my cheek, smoothed my cow lick with his palm. “You make me proud.”

  It was the only time I ever heard those words from my father.

  “Clowns,” Bolton said.

  “Clowns,” I said.

  “Clowns, yeah,” Phil said.

  “Okay,” Bolton said slowly. “Clowns,” he repeated and nodded to himself.

  “No shit,” I said.

  “Uh-huh.” He nodded again and then turned his huge head, looked directly at me. “You are, I’m assuming, fucking kidding me.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “No.”

  “We’re perfectly and completely friggin’ serious,” Phil said.

  “Jesus.” Bolton leaned against the sink, looked over at Angie. “Tell me you’re not part of this, Ms. Gennaro. You, at least, seem like a person of some rationality.”

  She tightened the belt on her robe. “I don’t know what to believe.” She shrugged her shoulders in the direction of Phil and me. “They seem pretty certain.”

  “Listen for a second—”

  He crossed to me in three large steps. “No. No. We’ve blown the surveillance because of you, Mr. Kenzie. You call me over here and say you’ve cracked the case. You’ve—”

  “I didn’t—”

  “—figured it all out and you need to see me right away. So I come over here and he’s here”—he pointed at Phil—“and now they’re here”—he jerked his head at Devin and Oscar—“and any hopes we had of suckering Evandro into this place are shot because it looks like a fucking law enforcement convention in here.” He paused for breath. “And I could have lived with all that as long as we were, oh, I don’t know, getting somewhere. But, no, you give me clowns.”

  “Mr. Bolton,” Phil said, “we’re serious here.”

  “Oh. Good. Let me see if I have this right—twenty years ago, two circus performers with bushy hair and rubber pants pull up beside you in a van while you’re walking to a Little League game and—”

  “From,” I said.

  “What?”

  “We were walking back from the game,” Phil said.

  “Mea culpa,” Bolton said and gave us a bow and flourish. “Mea maxima fucking culpa, tu morani.”

  “I’ve never been insulted in Latin before,” Devin said to Oscar. “You?”

  “Mandarin,” Oscar said. “Never Latin.”

  “Fine,” Bolton said. “You were accosted by two circus performers coming back from a game and because—do I have this right, Mr. Kenzie?—because Alec Hardiman sang ‘Send in the Clowns’ during the prison interview you think he was one of those clowns and that means, of course, that he’s been killing people to get back at you for escaping that day?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Oh, well, thank heaven. Look, Mr. Kenzie, twenty-five years ago I asked out Carol Yaeger of Chevy Chase, Maryland, and she laughed in my face. But that doesn’t—”

  “Hard to believe,” Devin said.

  “—mean I thought it perfectly logical to wait a couple of decades and kill everyone she ever knew.”

  “Bolton,” I said, “I’d love to keep watching you dig yourself a hole here, but time is short. You bring the Hardiman, Rugglestone, and Morrison files like I asked?”

  He patted his briefcase. “Right here.”

  “Open ’em.”

  “Mr. Kenzie—”

  “Please.”

  He opened the briefcase, pulled out the files, and set them on the kitchen table. “And?”

  “Check the ME’s report on Rugglestone. Specifically look at the section on unexplained toxins.”

  He found it, adjusted his glasses. “Yes?”

  “What was found in Rugglestone’s facial lacerations?”

  He read: “’Lemon extract; hydrogen peroxide; talc, mineral oil, stearic acid, peg-thirty-two, triethanolamine, lanolin…all consistent with ingredients of white Pan-Cake makeup.’” He looked up. “So?”

  “Read Hardiman’s file. Same section.”

  He flipped a few pages and did.

  “So? They were both wearing makeup.”

  “White Pan-Cake,” I said. “The kind mimes use,” I said. “And clowns.??
?

  “I see what—”

  “Cal Morrison was found with the same properties under his fingernails.”

  He opened the Morrison file, leafed through it until he found it.

  “Still,” he said.

  “Find the photograph of the van found outside the murder site—it was registered to Rugglestone.”

  He leafed through the file. “Here it is.”

  “It’s missing the windshield,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “But the van had been hosed clean, probably that day. Sometime between the hosing and the time the police found it, someone chucked some cinderblocks through the windshield, probably while Rugglestone was being murdered.”

  “So?”

  “So, I’d marked the windshield. I threw the baseball and put a spiderweb in the center. That was the only thing to suggest Hardiman and Rugglestone were the clowns. Remove the mark, remove the motive.”

  “What’s your point?”

  I didn’t truly believe it until I said it.

  “I think EEPA killed Charles Rugglestone.”

  “He’s right,” Devin said eventually.

  The hail had turned to rain shortly after eight, and the rain froze almost as soon as it hit. Streaks of water bled down Angie’s windows and rippled into veins of crackling ice before our eyes.

  Bolton had sent an agent back to the RV to make copies of the Rugglestone, Hardiman, and Morrison files, and we’d spent the last hour reading them in Angie’s dining room.

  Bolton said, “I’m not so sure.”

  “Please,” Angie said. “It’s all here if you look at it right. Everyone goes on the assumption that Alec Hardiman, loaded up on PCP, does the work of ten men when he kills Rugglestone. And if I was convinced Hardiman had killed several other people, I probably would have been swayed, too. But he had nerve damage in his left hand, seconol in his system, and was found passed out. Now, you look at Rugglestone’s wounds with the idea that maybe ten people—or, say, seven—were involved, and it makes perfect sense.”

  Devin said, “Patrick’s father knew about the damage to the windshield. He and his EEPA friends hunt it down, find Hardiman and Rugglestone…”

  “EEPA killed Rugglestone,” Oscar said with a note of shock in his voice.

  Bolton looked at the file, then at me, then back at the file. He peered at it, and his lips moved as he read over the section detailing Rugglestone’s wounds. When he looked at me, the flesh on his face drooped and his mouth opened. “You’re right,” he said softly. “You’re right.”

  “Don’t let it go to your head,” Devin said. “You prick.”

  “A child’s tale,” Bolton said in a low whisper.

  “What?”

  We sat together in the dining room. The rest of them were in the kitchen while Oscar cooked his famous steak tips.

  Bolton held up his hands in the darkness. “It’s like something out of the Brothers Grimm. The two clowns, the cavernous van, the threat to innocence.”

  I shrugged. “At the time, it was just scary.”

  “Your father,” he said.

  I watched fingers of ice congeal on the window.

  “You know what I’m getting at,” he said.

  I nodded. “He would have been the one who burned Rugglestone.”

  “In sections,” Bolton said. “While the man screamed.”

  The ice cracked and fragmented as streams of rain tunneled through it. Immediately, fresh translucent veins replaced it.

  “Yes,” I said, remembering my father’s kiss that evening. “My father burned Rugglestone alive. In sections.”

  “He was capable of that?”

  “I told you, Agent Bolton, he was capable of anything.”

  “But that?” Bolton said.

  I remembered my father’s lips on my cheek, the rush of blood I’d felt in his chest as he pulled me to him, the love in his voice when he told me I’d made him proud.

  Then I thought of the time he’d burned me with the iron, the smell of burning flesh that had risen from my abdomen and choked me as my father stared at me with a fury that bordered on ecstasy.

  “Not only was he capable of it,” I said, “he probably enjoyed it.”

  We were eating steak tips in the dining room when Erdham came in.

  “Yes?” Bolton said.

  Erdham handed him a photograph. “I thought you should see this.”

  Bolton wiped his mouth and fingers with a napkin, held the photo up to the light.

  “This is one of the ones found at Arujo’s place. Right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Have you identified the people in the photograph?”

  Erdham shook his head. “No, sir.”

  “So why am I looking at it, Agent Erdham?”

  Erdham looked at me and frowned. “It’s not so much the people, sir. Look where it was taken.”

  Bolton squinted at the photo. “Yes?”

  “Sir, if you—”

  “Wait a minute.” Bolton dropped his napkin onto his plate.

  “Yes, sir,” Erdham said and his body rippled.

  Bolton looked at me. “This is your place.”

  I put down my fork. “What’re you talking about?”

  “This photo was taken on the front porch of your three-decker.”

  “Of me or Patrick?” Angie said.

  Bolton shook his head. “Of a woman and a little girl.”

  “Grace,” I said.

  32

  I was the first one out of Angie’s house. I had a cellular phone to my ear as I stepped onto the porch and several government cars screeched up Howes.

  “Grace?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You okay?” I slipped on some black ice and righted myself by grabbing the railing as Angie and Bolton came onto the porch next.

  “What? You woke me up. I have to work at six. What time is it?”

  “Ten. Sorry.”

  “Can we talk in the morning?”

  “No. No. I need you to stay on the line and check all your doors and windows.”

  The cars slid to stops in front of the house.

  “What? What’s all that noise?”

  “Grace, check your doors and windows. Make sure they’re all locked.”

  I made my way to the slick sidewalk. The trees above were heavy and shimmering with daggers of ice. The street and sidewalk were a black glaze.

  “Patrick, I—”

  “Do it now, Grace.”

  I hopped in the back of the lead car, a dark blue Lincoln, and Angie sat beside me. Bolton sat up front and gave the driver Grace’s address.

  “Go.” I slapped the driver’s headrest. “Go. Go.”

  “Patrick,” Grace said, “what’s going on?”

  “You check the doors?”

  “I’m checking them now. Front door is locked. Cellar door is locked. Hang on, I’m heading to the back.”

  “Car coming up on our right,” Angie said.

  Our driver punched the gas as we shot through the intersection heading south and the car racing toward us from the east locked up his brakes on the ice and blared his horn and skidded across the intersection as the caravan of cars behind us jerked right and cruised around his back end.

  “Back door’s locked,” Grace said. “I’m checking windows now.”

  “Good.”

  “You’re scaring the shit out of me.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. The windows.”

  “Front bedroom and living room, all locked. I’m going into Mae’s room. Locked, locked…”

  “Mommy?”

  “It’s okay, honey. Stay in bed. I’ll be right back.”

  The Lincoln spun onto the 93 on-ramp doing at least sixty. The back wheels skipped over a bubble of ice or frozen slush and banged against the divider.

  “I’m in Annabeth’s room,” Grace whispered. “Locked. Locked. Open.”

  “Open?”

  “Yeah. She left it open just a crack.”

&
nbsp; “Shit.”

  “Patrick, tell me what’s going on.”

  “Close it, Grace. Close it.”

  “I did. What do you think—”

  “Where’s your gun?”

  “My gun? I don’t own one. I hate guns.”

  “A knife then.”

  “What?”

  “Get a knife, Grace. Jesus. Get a—”

  Angie ripped the phone out of my hand and shushed me with a finger to her lips.

  “Grace, it’s Ange. Listen. You may be in danger. We’re not sure. Just stay on the line with me and don’t move unless you’re sure there’s an intruder in there with you.”

  The exit signs flew past—Andrew Square, Massachusetts Avenue—and the Lincoln swerved onto Frontage Road, passed the industrial waste and Big Dig refuse in a blur as we hurtled toward East Berklee.

  “Bolton,” I said, “she’s not bait.”

  “I know.”

  “I want her buried so deep in protective custody the President couldn’t find her if he wanted to.”

  “I understand.”

  “Get Mae,” Angie said, “and stay in one room with the door locked. We’ll be there in three minutes. If someone tries to get through the door, go out the window and run toward Huntington or Mass. Ave., screaming your head off.”

  We blew the first red light on East Berklee and a car swerved out of our way, jumped the curb, and smashed into the light pole in front of Pine Street Inn.

  “There’s a lawsuit,” Bolton said.

  “No, no,” Angie said anxiously. “Don’t leave the house unless you hear something inside. If he’s waiting outside, that would be just what he wants. We’re almost there, Grace. Which room are you in?”

  The rear left tire ate the curb as we fishtailed onto Columbus Avenue.

  “Mae’s bedroom? Good. We’re eight blocks away.”

  The pavement of Columbus Avenue was buried under a quarter inch of ice so black and hard it looked like we were passing over a swath of pure licorice.

  I punched the door with the side of my fist as the wheels spun and then caught and then spun again.

  “Calm down,” Bolton said.

  Angie patted my knee.

  As the Lincoln turned right on West Newton, black-and-white images exploded in my head like flashbulbs.

  Kara, crucified in the cold.

  Jason Warren’s head swinging from a power cord.

  Peter Stimovich staring out from a face with no eyes.